european scholarship on identity: burckhardt, greenblatt ... · european scholarship on identity:...
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Roger L. Martinez-Davila
European Scholarship on Identity: Burckhardt, Greenblatt, Martin, and Ruggiero
It is not until the end of the fourteenth century that new perspectives on identity found
root in Spain. New notions of “who” was “who” had arrived, albeit, I argue Italians and
other Europeans were behind in relationship to Spaniards. There is a growing consensus
among early modern historians that there were fundamental shifts in social organization
and personal identities during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In short, these social
transformations were revolutionary because they shattered medieval religious identities
(i.e. Jewish versus Christian), and replaced them with multilayered and overlapping
categories (i.e. conversos, Jewish converts to Christianity). During his era, “group”
identity constructions fractured into “individualized” identities. The nineteenth century
historian, Jacob Burckhardt, who authored the influential text, The Civilization of the
Renaissance in Italy, initiated historians’ discussion of the issue of identity. He contended
that early modern persons perceived themselves, unlike their medieval counterparts, as
“spiritual individuals” distinctly separate from social groups. In one of his most poignant
observations on the matter, he wrote:
In the Middle Ages both sides of human consciousness—that which was turned
within as that which was turned without—lay dreaming or half awake beneath a
common veil. The veil was woven of faith, illusion and childish prepossessions,
through which the world and history were seen clad in strange hues. Man was
only conscious of himself as a member of a race, people, party, family, or
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corporation—only through some general category. In Italy this veil first melted
into air; an objective treatment and consideration of the state and of all the things
of this world became possible. The subjective side at the same time asserted itself
with corresponding emphasis; man became a spiritual individual, and recognized
himself as such.i
From Burckhardt’s observation that a subjective self arose from a morose corporate
community, it is comprehensible to perceive how persons create new forms of individual
perceptions. Stephen Greenblatt, author of Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to
Shakespeare, extends this argument and adds that the realm of the individual came to
fruition during the sixteenth century. He postulated, “There were selves and they could be
fashioned”.ii Greenblatt presents a compelling position that clarifies how the monotony of
medieval group identities, such as Christian or Jewish ones, could birth new individual
identities. Put simply, individuality created opportunities for great variability in identity.
Nonetheless, it would be inaccurate to suggest that the any member of a Castilian
converso family was by any means an “individual” as it is understood in this twenty-first
century. Rather, the idea of individuality was far more nuanced and unusual than one
might imagine. Greenblatt clarifies that these were not “expressive individuals”, but
rather persons that existed as “cultural artifacts” who were molded by social institutions.
In other words, persons were a direct byproduct of these convoluted events.
Another valuable intellectual who speaks to this issue is John Jeffries Martin and his
Myths of Renaissance Individualism. His text enhances our understanding of the multi-
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modal nature of early modern identities, argues that the Renaissance “self” was not a
“thing,” but a collection of relations between the internal and external experiences of the
individual. iii Early modern men and women viewed their identities as an array of
“possible permutations”—in essence, the self served as a flexible intermediary between
an individual’s interior and the social networks surrounding them.iv His neatly delineated
model proposes that Renaissance men and women understood the self as existing in five
forms—the socially conforming, prudential, performative, possessed, and the sincere self.
Martin asserts that some of these identities offered persons “at least an allusion of
control” over the self, whereas other identities either diluted the self into one of an
unwilling host, as in the case of the demonically possessed, or brought forth a precursor
of modernity, as demonstrated by the ethically enlightened sincere self.v Utilizing the
compounding lens of the late sixteenth-century thinker, Montaigne, Martin locates the
generation of the sincere self as an outcome of the Renaissance reconciliation of the
twelfth century notion of the Concordia of God and humanity, the Reformation’s concern
with sincerity but preoccupation with human sinfulness, and the new sense that men and
women as “agents” were responsible for their actions and assertions.
Lastly, consider Guido Ruggiero’s work, such as Machiavelli in Love, which explores
early modern sexuality identities in the context of broader social groups. For example, he
notes that a woman might hold more than one identity—that of a prostitute as well as an
honorable lady. In one context, a married woman of modest means who turned to
prostitution for financial sustenance was a whore, and other instances, the community
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might view her a good neighbor with honor.vi Ruggiero continues with his example of the
whore and lady, by adding:
The relativity of such socially shared ‘consensus identities’ explain much about
the apparently fluid nature of Renaissance identity and what has been labeled
Renaissance self-fashioning. In the end, as we shall see, there was perhaps less of
the later and more identity negotiation by individuals in dialogue with the various
social groups with which they lived, played, and worked.vii
Assembled together, this quadrumvirate of scholars artfully reconciles how the religious
and social tensions of the early modern period produced new forms of identities and
selves.
i Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, 98. ii Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 1. iii Jeffries Martin, Myths of Renaissance Individualism, ix. iv Ibid., 15. v Ibid., 36. vi Ruggiero, Machiavelli in Love, 21. vii Ibid., 21.